


Talking to You

by Emjen_Enla



Series: Prompted Works [21]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Dysfunctional Family, Gansey is called "Dick" literally the whole fic, Gen, Other, Pre-The Raven Boys, Quests, Sibling Relationship, Trying to Convince a Family Member to Do Something, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 09:16:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20273548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: Helen meets up with Gansey in France. Her goal is to convince him to come back to the US. Written for Gansey Week day 5 "Family."





	Talking to You

**Author's Note:**

> Today and tomorrow’s fics are best described as: Emjen fails epically at hiding her fascination with Gansey’s relationship with his parents. I apologize in advance.
> 
> Gansey is called “Dick” this entire fic, because that’s how Helen thinks of him. Honestly, I’m a little worried that he’s not entirely in character, but he is really on edge and guarded, so perhaps it works.
> 
> Note: Mr. and Mrs. Gansey and Helen do not believe Glendower is real like Gansey does, and that becomes very obvious in this fic.
> 
> Warning: Some vaguely ignorant opinions about mental health

Helen Gansey watched her little brother over a cup of coffee and the coffee table of the French cafe they were meeting in. Dick hadn’t bothered to come home since he’d moved out two years before, so this was the first time she’d seen him in person in literally years. It was odd seeing someone you used to know so well for the first time in years. She and Dick talked on the phone fairly regularly, but she hadn’t realized he’d managed to actually hit his growth spurt and start looking like an actual teenager in the years he’d been gone. It was just more proof that Dick’s life was going on without her in it.

Dick frowned at her over the rim of his own coffee cup. “Are you going to give me your excuse for why you’re in Paris?” he asked. “It would be much easier to pretend that you just happened to be in the area and didn’t come specifically to check on me, if I knew what the story was.”

Helen’s parents had told her to come up with a story to tell Dick about why she was in France, but looking at her little brother face-to-face for the first time in years, she found that she couldn’t do it. “I came here specifically to talk to you,” Helen said. “Mom and Dad suggested it.”

“They could have just called me if they had something they wanted to say,” Dick said. “It’s not like I’m ignoring them.”

“I think they wanted you to not be able to hang up,” Helen admitted.

Dick frowned. “What do they want to talk about that they think I might hang up on them for?”

Helen decided to cut to the chase. “They want you to come back to the States to finish high school.”

Dick went still. “They’ve never had a problem with me traveling before.”

That was only sort of true. It wasn’t that Helen and Dick’s parents didn’t have a problem with their sixteen-year-old son bombing around the world as an unaccompanied minor, it was that they didn’t exactly know how to tell him no. Dick with his mind made up was truly a force to be reckoned with. It wasn’t like he wasn’t responsible enough to be left without adult supervision--hell, as far as Helen could tell, he’d spent most of the last two years in the company of eccentric scholars old enough to be his grandparents. It was also unfortunately true that their parents didn’t know what to do with Dick when he was home. Helen couldn’t necessarily blame them for that because she didn’t know what to do with Dick either.

Helen remembered back before what she privately thought of as the Great Hornet Stinging Incident in an attempt to make it less scary, when Dick had just been her slightly annoying little brother. He’d been ten and had these plastic dinosaurs he was always trying to talk her into playing with. She’d been fourteen and far too old for such nonsense, then everything had changed and she’d been left missing the dinosaur toys. There had been a couple months directly afterwards, when Dick would creep into her bed and cuddle with her after he had a nightmare, but then all of a sudden he’d stopped. In fact he’d stopped everything. From the way he acted it had looked like everything was fine. Helen and her parents had been suspicious, but they could never find any proof that Dick wasn’t actually okay so eventually they’d just let the whole thing drop. It was easier anyhow. 

Then Dick had graduated middle school and sprung his grand trip plan on them. He’d couched it as a way to take advantage of the educational opportunities in other countries and argued his point passionately and thoroughly enough that their parents had eventually given in. He hadn’t mentioned anything about Glendower--the historical figure he’d been convinced had saved him from death by hornets when he was ten--but it had eventually come out that the whole trip was really just a cover to allow him to research that. When confronted, he claimed his interest in Glendower was purely academic, but there was no way to hide the fact that most of the places he’d gone on this trip were more of the arcane magic variety not the serious scholarship variety.

“He doesn’t still believe that Glendower saved him, does he?” Helen remembered overhearing her mother hissing to her father when they’d first made the realization.

“I don’t know,” her father had replied.

“He hasn’t talked about Glendower in years,” Her mother went on. “I thought this was all over.  _ What do we do?” _

_ “I don’t know!” _ her father had repeated.

Not knowing what to do that wouldn’t involve calling Dick out on the fact that he was chasing a hallucination caused by a near-death experience and causing far too much of a scene, their parents had just let Dick carry on. After all, when he called home he sounded rational and not like he was a danger to himself or others, maybe this trip would be the thing he needed to finally admit to himself that Glendower had not saved him.

“Why do Mom and Dad want me to come home, Helen?” Dick asked, taking a sip of his coffee. Did he look tired? Perhaps? It was hard to tell because she hadn’t seen him in so long.

“Mom’s running for Congress,” Helen said.

Dick almost but not quite rolled his eyes. “So I’ve heard. What does that have to do with me?”

“Honestly, Dick?” Helen said, deciding to cut to the chase. “You’ve been gallivanting around the world with no adult supervision for two years. It doesn’t look good.”

“I’ve told you to call me Gansey,” Dick said, which meant that he was trying to buy time to formulate a proper response. “Dick is a euphemism for penis. I’d prefer that it wasn’t my name.”

“Stop dogging the subject,” Helen said as levelly as she could. “This trip of yours was harmless before, but it’s not now. You need to come home and actually go to high school.”

“I’ve been doing high school online,” Dick said. “My grades are fine.”

From what Helen had heard from their parents, his grades were fine; the kind of fine you got when an intelligent person had most of their attention focused on something else. “It still doesn’t look good. You need to come home and finish it off somewhere notable. Dad’s been talking to some people at his old high school; he thinks he can get you in with no problems.”

“And they sent you here to tell me this so they wouldn’t have to?” Dick asked. For the first time in the conversation he sounded genuinely upset.

“Yes, they did,” Helen said bluntly, then figured that while she was being blunt she may as well go on, “Glendower didn’t save you, Dick. You were dying and you saw something; that happens all the time. Everyone else knows that. You just need to admit it to yourself and move on.”

Dick opened his mouth. For a second, Helen thought he was actually going to fight back and her frustration rose to meet the challenge. Finally let them have this out. Maybe some good yelling would finally get Dick to see sense.

Then Dick closed his mouth, leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath, and Helen realized he wasn’t going to engage her. She tried to crush her disappointment. It wasn’t like yelling at him was going to make him more likely to see her point of view. “Dick-”

“Mom and Dad are lucky, actually,” Dick spoke over her. “I was already contemplating coming back to the States for a school year.”

“What--Really?” Helen blinked. She had come here expecting to basically have to drag her brother back kicking and screaming; her parents had expected the same thing.

“Yes,” Dick said. “There’s a private high school school in Henrietta, Virginia. It’s called Aglionby. It’s an all boys boarding school. Very much Dad’s kind of place. The family doesn’t have connections with it, but it’s a good school just the same. I’ve been doing some research on it. They already finished accepting applications for this year, but if our parents make a sizable enough donation they could probably be persuaded to consider me.”

“You’re actually serious about this,” Helen said. “You’re not just saying this to get me off your back. How long have you been considering this?”

“Since I left Sussex,” Dick admitted. “This method hasn’t been working, and you know what they say about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”

“Wait,” Helen said, her blood running cold. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Glendower, does it? What could there possibly be about a dead Welsh king in the middle of Virginia?”

Dick didn’t respond for a minute, then he looked her in the face and said levelly, “I think that Aglionby is the perfect place for me right now.”

He refused to speak about any connection between Glendower and his future plans for the rest of Helen’s stay in Paris.


End file.
